The most urgent political task, now and into the indefinite future, is to articulate such home truths, in direct defiance of the "progressive" Zeitgeist. That, more than anything else, is what Reagan and Thatcher accomplished in their day: setting their faces against the Statist breeze. Lord knows, they accomplished little at the practical level. But for a glimmering moment, they helped us remember that a nation is her people and not her government.

They knew that bureaucracy is an evil; but accepted it as a necessary evil, susceptible to reform and occasional "downsizing." We need to take one step farther, and grasp that it is an unnecessary evil -- that any human activity which requires a cumbersome bureaucracy is itself morally dubious; that anything which reduces the human being to a "unit" for bureaucratic purposes is in its nature inhuman.

Moreover, to invoke Wilberforce here, the evil is suffered not only by the slave. It is also suffered by the master. The power that bureaucracy confers on the individual bureaucrat -- the control it gives him over other people's lives -- is morally even more destructive of him than of the subjects of his ministrations. Of course, there are good, well-meaning people working in the bureaucracies; but there were also good, well-meaning slaveholders.

I emphasize the problem of articulation, over time, because the work of dismantling "nanny" is, of necessity, the work of more than one generation. It took more than a century to get from Bismarck's innovations in 19th-century Prussia to the bankrupt "welfare state" of today; and I cannot imagine it will take less time to undo this tragic error.